Telegraph Avenue

by Michael Chabon

  As soon as Gwen appeared alongside the booth, Archy seemed to cotton all at once on to the whole scenario—wife, discovery, beads, size-large suff—with the instantaneous understanding common to unfaithful men. In the space of that instant, his eyes widened, apologizing, protesting, as wooden beads rained around him and eighteen ounces of ice-cold Ethiopian beverage were upended onto his head.

  “Damn,” he said as the milk-white stuff streamed down his glasses and alongside his nose into his collar. He did not lose his temper, raise his voice, jump out of the way, or even shake himself like the dog he was. He just sat there dripping, suffering the punishment, as if doing so were a form of uxorious indulgence, the price that must be paid for having a wife who was not merely pregnant but, apparently, out of her mind. “I was only talking to the girl.”

  “Excuse me,” said Elsabet Getachew with her husky accent, attempting with head lowered to slide out of the booth. Her hair was a glory of tendrils for the snaring of husbands. She smelled violently of the kitchen, of nuts and oils and crushed handfuls of orange spice. Gwen interposed herself between the woman and freedom, glad to be huge and impassable. She waited until the young woman looked up, daring her to meet the wifely gaze: a wall, a dam, the arm of a government. The girl looked up. In those ibex eyes, Gwen saw guilt and mockery; but above all: contempt.

  All at once the lights came on inside of Gwen. She looked down at her belly, at her pilled and distended stretch top, at the saggy knees of her CP Shades pants, at the ragged black espadrilles into which she stuffed her feet. And under all that! the preposterous bra, the geriatric panties!

  “No excuse for you,” Gwen said feebly, and stepped aside.

  Elsabet Getachew slipped past her and disappeared through another fringe of beads into the kitchen. Apart from the happy couple, there were now nine other human beings in the dining room, and all of them appeared to be enjoying the ongoing spectacle of Gwen.

  “So, what?” Archy wanted to know. “Now I’m not allowed to interact with my fellow neighborhood merchants? Maintain the dialogue? How we supposed to keep a lid on crime, we don’t exchange tips and information, tell me that?”

  “ ‘Tips and information,’ ” she quoted. “Uh-huh. I see.”

  “Always have to assume the worst-case scenario.” He grabbed up some napkins and tenderly patted his pate, dabbed at his streaming cheeks. He shook his head.

  “I just go with the odds, Archy,” Gwen said. “I’m looking at the numbers.”

  Yes, she conceded as he followed her out the front door of the restaurant and down Telegraph to her black 1999 BMW convertible, Archy and Elsabet had appeared to be just talking, and if they were just talking, then it was completely and without question unreasonable for her to have bugged out on him the way she had. Given the innocence of the observed encounter, it was wrong to have gone and drenched his beautiful pumpkin sweater and tweeds in a soft drink from the Horn of Africa. Yes, she knew perfectly well that Archy ate lunch at Queen of Sheba all the time. She knew that Elsabet Getachew worked at the restaurant and that she was the niece of the owner, who was a nice guy. And no, she did not expect him to be rude to a friend and fellow member of the Temescal Merchants Association.

  “It’s the indignity of it,” she heard herself telling him, invoking a key concept of her mother’s code of morality with such stone likeness that it chilled her, spiders walked on the back of her neck, you might as well swing the camera around and show Rod Serling standing there behind a potted banana tree in an eerie cloud of cigarette smoke.

  She got right up in his face so she could make her speech without raising her voice.“I have been doing this for thirty-six weeks,” she began. “I am tired, I am large, I am hormonal. And I am hot. I am so hot and so large, I have to wear a culotte slip to keep my thighs from rubbing together when I walk. So, I admit, yes, I lost it. Maybe I ought not have poured my drink on your head. But I don’t know”—was this the prompting of estrogen or logic? could she tell the difference anymore?—“maybe I ought. Because even if you are ‘just talking’ to some astonishingly beautiful girl, Archy, it’s humiliating. I’m sick of it. I have to walk around my city, the place where I live, and wonder if next time I stop in, wherever, I don’t know, the drugstore to pick up a jar of Tucks medicated pads, I’m going to see my husband macking on the pharmacist.” This was not a hypothetical example. “It’s embarrassing. I have more pride than that.” She placed a hand against her sternum then, feeling the next words coming like a mighty belch. She lowered her voice to a whisper, as if being obliged to invoke the memory of her immensely dignified mother, only the second female African-American graduate of Harvard Medical School, were the greatest humiliation of all. “I have too much self-respect.”

  “Way too much,” Archy agreed.

  “Swear to me, Archy,” she said. “Raise your right hand and swear to me, on the soul of your mother, you aren’t getting up to anything with that girl, Chewbacca or whatever her name is.”

  “I swear,” Archy said, but there was appended no oath that might require the damnation of his late mother. No raised hand.

  “Raise it up,” Gwen said.

  Archy lifted his right hand, a flag of surrender.

  “Swear. On the soul of your mother, who raised you to be a better man than that.”

  Before forming the words required, Archy hesitated, and in that half-second he was lost. All Gwen’s protestations of dignity and invocations of self-respect were scattered like deck chairs on the promenade of a heaving ship. She glanced up and down the street, casing it for witnesses, then plunged her hand down into the front of his pants. The upper serif of his belt buckle, a gold Ferragamo F, scraped her wrist. Her fingers found the heavy coil of hose cupped in the bag of his boxers. Her fingertips were briefly snagged by a film of bodily adhesive as weak as the glue on a Post-it. She tugged her sticky fingers loose, brought them to her nose, and took a quick but practiced sniff. Market stalls, smoking braziers, panniers of lentils. All the spice and stink of Ethiopia: turmeric, scorched butter, the salt of the Red Sea.

  “Motherfucker,” Gwen said, turning on itself, like a cell going cancerous, the oath that Archy would not swear. It was only the third time in her life that she had used the word, and the first time without quotation marks demurely implied, and after it there was nothing more to say. Gwen went around to the driver’s side of the car, ignoring a parking citation in an acid-green envelope that had been poked, during her absence, under her left wiper. She guided herself into the space between seat and steering wheel. Then she and her battered dignity drove off, with the parking ticket flapping against the windshield and with the want of a cup of suff—for one more caramel sip of which she just then would have endured any affront to her self-esteem or stain upon her pride—doomed to burn on inside her, unassuaged, for many days.

  The house on Stonewall Road was one of those California canyon houses put up in the late sixties with a Jet Propulsion Laboratory arrogance toward gravity, a set of angles on skinny poles engineered out into the green void. From the street, all you could see of it was its mailbox and carport, with the house concealed downslope as if it planned to spring an ambush on a passerby. In the middle of the driveway, over an eternal attendant puddle of leaking motor oil, sat Aviva Roth-Jaffe’s car, a Volvo station wagon whose age could be reckoned in decades. It had gold-on-blue vanity plates that read HEK8. At some point it had been condemned by a hundred-dollar Earl Scheib paint job to approximate the color of a squirt of fluoride Crest.

  Gwen leaned against the trunk of her car, took a long slow breath. Shook off as much of the memory of the past half hour as would shake loose, and tamped down everything else. She had work to do, and when this job was over, her husband would still be there, and he would still be a dog, and the smell of another woman’s pussy would still be on him. She hoisted her black gym bag over her shoulder—the bag held clean bed linens, gloves, meds and syringes, forceps, a portable Doppler—and hefted it and herself down the twisting s
tairway from the street to the front door. The slope behind her was overgrown with morning glory. Tendrils of jasmine fingered the wooden stairs. A huge trumpet vine with its disappointed yellow mouths threatened to engulf the wooden house clear to the peak of the steep shed roof. The air on Stonewall Road smelled of cedar bark, eucalyptus, fir logs burning in a woodstove. From the lowest limb of a Meyer lemon, a wind chime searched without urgency for a melody to play. An adhesive sticker pasted to the sidelight beside the front door told prospective firefighters how many cats (three) to risk their lives in rescuing. From inside the house came the forlorn and piteous bellowing of an animal in pain.

  “Hello?” Gwen called, letting herself in the front door. A small black Buddha greeted her from a low table by the front door, where it kept company with a photograph of Lydia Frankenthaler, the producer of an Oscar-winning documentary film about the neglected plight of lesbians in Nazi Germany; Lydia’s partner, Garth; and Lydia’s daughter from her first marriage, a child whose father was black and whose name Gwen had forgotten. It was a Chinese Buddha, the kind that was supposed to pull in money and luck, jolly, baby-faced, and potbellied, reminding Gwen of her darling husband apart from the signal difference that you could rub the continental expanse of Archy Stallings’s abdomen for a very long time without attracting any flow of money in your direction. “Somebody having a baby around here?”

  “In here, Gwen,” Aviva said.

  Lydia and Garth, a lawyer for the poor, were having their baby in their living room. It was a large room with a vaulted ceiling and nothing between it and the canyon but a wall of solid glass. The girl—Arabia, Alabama, she had a geographical name—sat marveling blankly at the spectacle of her naked mother reposed like an abstract chunk of marble sculpture in the center of the room. Against her legs the girl held a rectangle of cardstock to which she had pasted the three pages of her mother’s birth plan, decorating the borders in four colors of marker with flowers and vines and a happy-looking fetus labeled BELLA. Two low sofas had been pushed to the sides of the room to make space for a wide flat sandwich crafted from a tatami mat, a slab of egg-carton foam rubber, and a shower curtain decorated with a giant self-portrait of Frida Kahlo. Garth, a small-boned, thin-shanked man with a red beard and red stubble on his head, lay sleeping on the improvised bed.

  “I’m at nine!” said Lydia by way of greeting, adding whatever comment was provided by her spread, furry-ish butt cheeks and the backs of her legs as she bent over in the downward-facing-dog position to grab two handfuls of floor. “A hundred percent effaced.”

  “I’ve been trying to persuade her to try a little push,” said Aviva. She tilted back on her haunches, down on the floor beside Lydia, studying the looming pale elderly secundigravida. Disapproving of the woman, but only Gwen would have caught it, the lips pursed to the left as if withholding a kiss. Barefoot in a loose cotton shift over black ripstop pedal pushers, the roiling surf of her black hair, with its silver eddies, pulled back and tied in a sloppy bun. Stubble showing blue against her luminous shins. Toenails painted a deep cocoa red like the skin of Archy’s Queen of Sheba. “But all Mom wants to do is goof around like that.”

  “I don’t want to push,” Lydia said. A string of pain drew and cinched her voice, a yogic voice, inverted and tied carefully to the rhythm of her breathing. “Is it okay, Gwen? Can’t I just stay this way for a little while longer? It feels a lot better.”

  If Aviva said it was time to try a little push, then it was, in Gwen’s view, time to try a little push. You did not get to be the Alice Waters of Midwives by leaving your gratins in the oven too long.

  “Well, you’ve got gravity working for you,” Gwen tried, less inclined than her partner to patience or politeness but good for at least one go-round with an upside-down naked lady in labor. “But if anybody ever pushed out a baby in that jackknife thing you’ve got working right there, Lydia, then I never heard about it.”

  “It could be interesting,” Aviva said. “Now that you mention it. Maybe you should give it a try.” The words were humorous, but her tone continued to be critical, at least to Gwen’s ear.

  “Let me just wash my hands and whatnot, and then I’ll fire up my Doppler and see what’s happening in there,” Gwen said, dropping her bag on a black leather armchair. “Hi, honey.” Arcadia. “What do you think of all this, Miss Arcadia?”

  The girl shrugged, eyes wide and teary but not despairing. Without cant or reference to the threefold moon goddess or other such nonsense, it was a deep and solemn business that they were about in this room, and nobody was going to feel that, in all its fathomlessness, like a kid. Certainly not old Garth over there, sacked out with one toe poking out of his left sock and sleep working the bellows of his skinny frame.

  “Kind of gross,” the girl said, hoisting the birth plan higher as if to shield herself from the grossness of it. Article Seven requested that the umbilical cord not be cut until the placenta had ceased to pump. Article Twelve was some kind of nonsense about the use of artificial light. Gwen was not one to disrespect a well-made birth plan, but there were always wishful thinking and juju involved, and when things went the way they were going to go, as they must, many plans took on a retrospective air of foolishness. “No offense, Mom.”

  “You don’t.” The string cinching tighter. “Have to. Watch it, baby. I told you—”

  “I want to stay.”

  “Gross can be interesting,” Gwen said. “Huh?”

  Arcadia nodded.

  Lydia lowered her hips and sank to her knees, giving way like a sand castle, and on all fours she rested, head hung, eyes closed, as if about to pantomime some animal behavior. “I’m going to push now,” she announced. In the same stewardessy voice, she added, “Everyone please shut up.”

  Her tone was wrong and startling, like a struck wineglass with a secret flaw, and at once Garth sat up and gaped at Gwen, blinking, wiping his lips with his sleeve. “What’s wrong?” he said. His eyes came unstuck from Gwen’s, and he looked around, kicking up from the deep-sea trench of a dream, looking for his new baby, finding his wife, who was seeing nothing at all.

  “Everything’s fine, sweetie,” Aviva said. “Only we’re going to need Frida Kahlo.”

  Gwen went into the kitchen to drink a glass of water and, in the name of asepsis if not pride, eradicate every last whiff of Elsabet Getachew from her hands. No excuse for you—that was sterling dialogue. She strangled the renascent memory of her shame with a pair of latex-free gloves. When she came back into the living room, she saw that Frida Kahlo had been veiled with an orange bath towel. Lydia lay on her back, propped up on an old plaid bolster, pale abdomen shot like an eyeball with capillaries, making a new kind of low growling sound that built slowly to an energetic whoop and flowered in a burst of foul language that made everybody laugh.

  “Good one,” Aviva said. “Good one.”

  Though Aviva had caught a thousand babies with hands that were steady and adept, now that it was time, she deferred to her partner, to the virtuoso hands of Gwen Shanks, freaky-big, fluid as a couple of tide-pool dwellers, cabled like the Golden Gate Bridge.

  As Aviva gave way to Gwen, she tried by means of her powerfully signifying eyebrows to communicate that she felt something in this situation to be amiss, something not provided for in the birth plan, which lay sagging and looped onto itself under the little girl’s chair. Aviva’s apparent psychic ability to know in advance when something might go wrong, especially in the context of a birth, was not merely the statistical fruit of an abiding pessimism. Skeptic that she was, Gwen had seen Aviva make unlikely but correct predictions of disaster too many times to discount. Gwen frowned, trying to see or feel what Aviva had detected, coming up short. By the time she turned to Lydia, every trace of the frown had been blown away.

  “Okay,” she said, “let’s see what little old Miss Bella is up to.”

  Gwen lowered herself by inches and prayers to the floor and, when she arrived, saw that the inner labia of Lydia Frankenthal
er had conformed themselves into a fiery circle. A smear of fluid and hair presented its credentials at this checkpoint, advance man for the imminently arriving ambassadress from afar.

  “You’re working fast now,” Gwen said. “You’re crowning. Here we go. Oh my goodness.”

  “Lydia, honey, remember how you said you really didn’t want to push,” Aviva said, climbing in alongside Gwen, “well, now I would actually like you to stop. Stop pushing. Just let her—”

  “Coming fast,” Gwen said. “Look out.”

  There was a ripple of liquid and skin, then with a vaginal sigh, the little girl squirted faceup into Gwen’s wide hands. The small eyes were open, nebular, and dull, but in the instant before she cried out, they ignited, and the child seemed to regard Gwen Shanks. The air was filled with a hot smell between sex and butchery. The father said “oh” and pressed in beside Gwen to take the sticky baby as she passed it to him. Arcadia hung back, aghast and thrilling to the redness of the birth and the life kindling in her father’s hands. They wrapped the baby loosely in a candy-striped blanket, and as Aviva stroked Lydia’s hair and helped to raise her head, Garth and Arcadia made the necessary introductions of mother and baby and breast. That left Gwen, crouched at the other end of the silvery umbilicus, to observe the heavy flow of blood that seeped from Lydia’s vagina in a slow pulsation, like water from a saturated sponge.

  It required all of Gwen’s training and innate gift for minimization of disaster not to pronounce the fatal syllables “Ho, shit.” But Aviva caught something in her face or shoulders, and when Gwen looked up from the pulsing blood that had begun to pool in a red half-dollar on the shower curtain, her partner was already on her way around to have a look. Aviva hunched down behind Gwen, an umpire leaning in on a catcher’s shoulder to get a better look at the ball as it came down the pike. She smelled of lemon peel and armpit in a way that barely registered with Gwen by now except as a steadying presence. They settled in to wait for the placenta. The soft click-click of the baby’s nursing marked the passing of several minutes. Aviva reached down and gave a gentle tug on the umbilical cord. She frowned. She made a humming sound deep in her throat and then said, “Hmm.”